Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
Don’t be fooled. Most went back.
Quantity is not quality.
More important is originality…
Lots of people/bots would just take an existing post from Reddit, and repost it. Sometimes to a different sub, sometimes to the same sub.
For most users, it was still “new” because they hadn’t seen it before.
Those accounts are still reposting. There’s more than few that do it here too.
But that OC has been drastically cut down, there’s just a delay in users noticing that there’s fewer and fewer “new” reposts going around.
So reddit doesn’t see a huge decrease in users immediately, but time on site and daily users will continue to decrease
More important is originality…
Is it, though? I left Reddit for here, so don’t take this as being in their defense, but if originality and ad revenue were meaningfully correlated, Facebook and Instagram would be bastions of original content.
Hell, some of the most profitable YouTubers only post reaction content.
You’d have a point on any other platform. See, the unique thing about Reddit was that you could go there for OC. It’s basic business that you carve out a niche and you play that niche away from the competition. Reddit may not be doomed to fail but it is doomed to stagnate because it is competing closer with Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and news sites without decent ways to monetize and grow.
Investors like to see a unique market. Why is the platform retaining users? Moderation is on a downhill slide and these huge communities hardly feel organic.
Reddit is becoming Facebook + porn and the porn makes them no money. It’s actively unattractive to investors.
What sucks for them is that the users themselves cause this. OC is hard to make. Harder to highlight and celebrate. Reposts and news about politics and porn are 90% of the site. They get upvotes constantly. There’s an audience for that, but it has far less growth potential.
To me it is.
That works in both directions. Don’t assume that the few that didn’t return are the ones that would have saved Reddit via incredible content.
Quality is the same, on most middle size subs.
Never was subbed to those. Quality dived many years ago on those subs I cared about.
I was active nearly every day for 13 years, and I didn’t return. Granted, I don’t come here much either, but what Reddit did disgusted me too much.
My reddit account is 15 years old. I removed myself as a mod from the communities I took care of before signing out.
If they want to shit on the mods, they can handle the job themselves.
I was transitioning out, but it just felt disgusting to even open the site so I stopped doing it. I probably have a bunch of unread messages because of that.
As 10+ year vet, I still go back for certain things. Mostly communities that have not been recreated here yet in any meaningful sense, and there are a lot of those. There are people here, yes, but the niches, the non-general topics, are lacking a true community. That will come with time, but I still can’t substitute Lemmy for reddit 100% yet, much as I might want to. Unless I only want to talk technology, news, and politics all day.
But I will say Boost for Lemmy has taken the spot RIF once had on my mobile home screen. Lemmy is what I open reflexively now. I only go back to reddit when I need to see something specific, I’m not browsing there. Partially because it’s very tedious to navigate old.reddit on mobile, but partially because I just don’t want to spend too much time there anymore.
same here, since 2008. Pretty much every user of the site was on the same standard default subreddits. I don’t like what Reddit has become but I don’t blame them like a lot of people here.
Honestly they were a corporation from the get-go, out to make money once it became popular. They built something no one else did.
But going forward, the little reddit escapade from their corporate suite shows that freedom of speech can only thrive when there is no driving profit motive.
Spez wanted to be Zuck and just like Zuck, he allowed bad people to abuse the site in order to hurt others.
16 years and agreed.
Did they? I had one of the top non-porn accounts actually run by a person (most high karma accounts use bots, I didn’t out of ironic laziness) and I haven’t posted or commented since whenever Day 0 was for rif is fun. I’ve been back a couple times for very specific things but not logged in or participating in any active way. Of course, I’m just one (high karma) data point, but I really don’t think I’m unique in this. I also have no real desire to contribute to Reddit again in the future. Getting off of it has been pretty nice.
Look, it’s not that people aren’t still posting, the site obviously still has content, but it really is just “content.” The quality of discussion I’ve seen has gone down pretty steep. Modding appears to be almost nonexistent in big subs or very agenda-driven otherwise. I think a lot of contributors who treated Reddit like old school forums have left and it’s slowly turning into a weird combo of Facebook and 4chan if that makes sense. If that’s what the userbase wants, go for it, I guess. But that’s not my jam.
A lot of search results still take me to Reddit. It is still a source of knowledge.
I tell myself that landing on Reddit, because of a search result is different than logging in on Reddit and subsequently browsing Reddit.
Using their app is on another level.
It is, there’s a lot of highly specific knowledge on Reddit. It’s still a resource.
As much as I hate to admit it, I’m considering it too - not instead, but also. I haven’t been back since Apollo died but Lemmy just doesn’t have the diversity of interests and niche communities yet. It feels really one dimensional sometimes.
I’m not. Pretty happy here overall.
Sometimes I want to see things besides hard left politics, Linux and furries. And a huge helping of divorced-from-reality beyond-left opinions from .ml and whatever hexbear is.
And I know I can block all those communities, but you’re not left with a ton once you do. Those demographics are dramatically over represented on lemmy.
If someone can tell me which direction to game specific communities i used to be part of (RimWorld, Souls games, Paradox games…) I’d be happy. Now I can only rely on discord.
And no, don’t tell me to create the community and content myself. The audience isn’t even high enough for discussing all games as a whole let alone specific games. This is what “let Lemmy stay small” crowd misses. Niche community can only be started as branch of (very) large community.
For me the main issue is that my professional community is pretty active there but not here. So if I want to share some professional work and discussion, I can only go there. I will probably double post out of activism but I know it won’t have much effect. For entertainment though, I’m good here.
Yeah. Lemmy really isn’t as good as Reddit. You run into people on Lemmy who will ban you just because you disagree with their echo chamber. Also, there isn’t as much content.
I’ll be honest. I want to believe in the Fediverse and Lemmy, really really hard.
It’s ideals (rather, the gestalt of the best of what everyone says is the best of Federation) appeals strongly.
But sometimes, it’s instance after instance of complaining about this or that. Double points when it’s all reddit complaining.
I dunno if being a heavy content creator necessitates an air of misguided superiority but there’s no more nuance here than anywhere else, and the content can’t seem to form precisely because everyone decides to take their toys away and do their own thing at the smallest provocation.
I don’t use them on my phone because fuck their app, but I’ve found no choice but to join up with an alias and as much extensions to make their job harder as Firefox allows, just to have genuine discussions on hyper specific topics from a PC.
But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That’s devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.
Will never happen.
?
Me, going back to that cesspool. I left quite the account behind as well.
I go back for a couple niche communities that haven’t escaped yet. And occasional search results for advice, but that tends to be 3-5+ years old on average.
When I’ve gone back for a look I’ve found just the opposite. It’s just bots and trolls.
What I’ve noticed is it became way more toxic over there since the API changes
I still scurry over occasionally (a lot of communities didn’t move over) but not nearly as much as I used to
Same. It runs so badly now, and enough moderators left or cut back that it is not the same site it was at all. Some communities are still intact, but I’ve begun to see lemmy and even Mastodon results in searches alongside reddit. It’s going to take a while to see if reddit can recover (it’ll take some humility and leadership from the top which seems unlikely) or die slowly then all at once. Remember digg, etc? The internet is fickle and for every Facebook there are a hundred friendsters.
Ironically way more bot now
I still occasionally browse the smaller subs when I need help on things like /r/unraid.
That was one of the reasons they killed the api: to support ad growth. Unfortunately they failed to realize the combination of ad-blocking browsers and users just quitting the site from losing client access means they were never going to hit pre-IPO revenue targets.
Had they instead focused on affordable API pricing and driving subscriber revenues up, they would have exceeded revenue targets.
source: I was in a somewhat similar position (not quite the same, no third party client), but chose different and found myself making more subscription revenue than ad revenue thanks to a viewer base more than happy to pay more.
Do you have any data to support that? My feeling is that not much changed after that. I feel like there is business as usual there. At least when I talk to my peers.
It’s kinda funny on Reddit, you would have had to pay for your picture comment. I’m happy to donate to lemmy, but putting features like this behind paywalls is silly.
You have to pay to post pics? When did that happen?
It was recent.
I’m going to have to trust you because I’m not going back there to check.
being able to post inline images was a reddit premium feature in the official app only, iirc. you could still link images to text like we had always done in ye olden days and use an inline image opener to get the same results… but grifters gonna grift.
souce?
Did you ask the wrong person? I was asking as well.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
I will say, though, anything that disincentives people to spam useless images and gifs in the comments, kind of like the next comment down, has its merits.
If there’s one thing I miss about Reddit, it’s that there was a lot less of this Discord-esc image spam over there than there is over here
Dear fucking god, THAT explains why I couldn’t do that.
Its always the same with online services/platforms looking to make money. Offer a free or cheap online service/platform, then advertisements, then more advertisements, then start removing features and hiding them behind paywalls, then more advertisements, then death.
Or, like Facebook and Insta, you get so big that the world itself warps around your platform because no one can remember the before times.
Sounds very familiar. I think I’ve heard pretty much the same thing before when discussing paying for streaming services as opposed to sailing the high seas.
Anyone else posted this yet?
Nope and I really wish nobody had still.
This reminds me… we need an “I’m sorry Garfield” community on Lemmy.
You mean “I’m sorry John”?
Fuck. You’re right.
Stick to your guns. I’m sorry John has been done. Now is the time for Garfield’s comeuppance.
No, i want ‘im sorry garfield’.
Be the change you want to see in the world, TacoButtPlug.
You’re right.
He took one for the community with spez, I’m surprised there isn’t one yet. Guess you can have the honors, TacoButtPlug.
why does garfield have preposterously large bazongas
Too much lasagna.
You spelled “magnificently” wrong.
The origin story:
Does this represent some higher meaning or is it just Garfield fucking spez?
Yes
Why not both?
Looks like someone’s got a case of the Mondays
Looks like yours went up first lol, but as long as it’s up. 🫡
Reddit’s value as a social media platform drops as it’s value to advertisers rises. The more mutilated it becomes, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
I don’t think they care. They’ll just eat their bacon and sell the pig’s corpse for someone else to further mutilate. That’s the entire point of the IPO, selling out, no?
When having a bacon and egg breakfast the hen participants the pig is committed.
You had me at bacon…
I reached the same conclusion and posted it to reddit over a decade ago, asking people to try to come up with a better solution, long before I even knew open source software was a thing.
Well, took 15 years, but lemmy exists now so hooray!
I deleted my reddit account and joined lemmy during the subreddit blackout, but there’s still a few authors I follow on reddit. Most I’ve followed to other sites, and just recently one was suspended for what sounds like a fuck up on reddit’s end.
Reddit lost most of their quality content creators and I can’t see the few remaining staying long term.
Oink bitch wallow in mud
Is he Australian?
Nothing to celebrate.
Reddit revenue is still up, just not as much as they had hoped.
That’s still enough to tank an IPO.
Yup it’s all about expected growth.
Yep, in the face of the infinite growth monster, anything other than exceeding expectations is seen as a failure
“We see here you’re up 5%, but you were up 5% last year too, so you’re dead now.”
-Capitalism
I still remember a line from a boss I had in one of my very first “real” jobs. “I expect you to exceed my expectations.”
I didn’t bother pointing out the problem there. I also didn’t stay working for her for very long. :)
Can you buy puts on an IPO?
Reddit, as a concept, can’t make more money without destroying it’s value. The more advertising is injected into it, the less useful it becomes, and the less people will want to use it.
So yes, it’s up, but they’ve hurt themselves drastically to get it up by hurting so much of Reddit’s usefulness, and even then, they fell short. People who remained are already low on patience with it.
To drive it even higher, they will have to cripple it even more.
It’s possible to make money with Reddit while leaving it unmolested, but it’s not possible to make ALL the money that way. Investors want ALL the money.
I’m doing my part, fuck spez
Just make sure to use protection. He fucked so many people that you never know what he might carry.
Do you want to know more?
Yes
Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.
They feel like they get shorted because many of those users don’t contribute to ad revenue from 3rd party apps but instead of improving their app to lure users in they instead tell those users to fuck off.
A user is a user, even if they don’t contribute directly to ad revenue they contribute content to make the site more alluring for those who will contribute to ad revenue. As well they help spread the word about reddit to those who don’t use it regularly yet by sharing that content outside of reddit.
They were pretty short sighted by doing what they did.
It’s just many power users and mods were power users and mods thanks to tools in these apps, and Reddit still didn’t provide anything comparable. Many small communities I still care about have a lot less posts if they don’t have bots. It’s not like Fediverse won Reddit, but something changed in them. NSFW OC subs are still good, but idk if they make the image spez wants from that platfom. The only thing we def should do is to stay online and be welcome for stray redditors to join.
I would have been happy to pay to get API access for 3rd party apps on my account. Maybe 1 or 2 dollars per account and month would have been reasonable to cover the costs without ad revenue. Double it to please greedy shareholders.
Instead they asked for such ludicrous amounts from 3rd party developers, basically telling them to fuck off.
Either they were mad for control or got greedy over their „golden data“ for AI training. Or both. In any case, they never were interested in finding a user friendly solution so fuck them.
The phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” comes to mind.
I believe it’s “spider-face.”
Some app dev mentioned they wanted to work with them to introduce ads that Reddit would have made profit from in the free version of the app and it’s Reddit that said “Nah it’s ok”…
Do you have a citation on that 25% figure?
Source: my bias
Well yeah, I’m probably not the only daily active user who stopped visiting all together… after 10+ years of daily active use. They brought this on themselves.
Same, but only a few years user. Sync for lemmy is so much better.
I loved Sync for Reddit as an app. But I already was seeing Reddit go downhill even before they killed the apps, that just sealed the deal for me. I was a digg refugee so sadly I’ve been through this before already.
It’s such bullshit, Reddit could have been so much more. Researching my latest purchase/obsession, and the only way to find anything that isn’t corporate sponsored reviews or AI content farming is to add the word “Reddit” to the end of the search.
As someone with an 11 year old account that I deleted during the TPA debacle, I fully recognise that there’s a huge problem here. Reddit created a place where people wanted to put their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and now that they are cashing out TOO FUCKING BAD LAME EBD USER.
Edit: /oblig fuck you spez. Slimy little arsehole sold everyone out and thinks he deserves to be rich because his shitty site isn’t absolutely irredeemable.
Reddit was like the StackOverflow for life
…sometimes coding too We’re like regressing to friend’s or known in person people’s opinions, because Internet will be full of bot and sponsored content and opinions. Either way, double money for corporations, sponsored content ->more sales; people not trusting reviews and trying out stuff just to find out it’s rubbish ->more sales
11 year old account on Reddit too and I left it during TPA too. Had nearly 2 million karma. Same username as this one.
Good, fuck spez.
Reddit who?
If I can’t browse my way, I simply don’t use the site.
If reddit pops up in a search result on my browser, wellll best believe I have multiple adblockers making sure their ads don’t load.
And every time a Reddit results show up, I’m immediately reminded why I don’t want to go there by an error telling me that I can’t use the site without logging in.
Fortunately, just changing the link to old.reddit.com still works even through VPN, but fuck this behavior. I do that only for questions I really need an answer and couldn’t find anywhere else, and most of the time the replies are shit anyway.
Hate any results from Twitter as well.
Log in, log in, tell us who you are!
Fuck you. I never made an account when it wasn’t run by a thin-skinned narcissistic man-child, and I’m not about to start now.
Thanks for the tip I didn’t know that 🙂
It’s probably more to do with using a VPN than not being logged in. If I’m searching for something on a search engine and Reddit comes up in the results with potentially useful information, then I’ll go there (the only time I go there now). I don’t use a VPN and I’m never logged in, and I’ve never seen that page come up.
Which makes sense, because those greedy bastards are trying to hyper-monetize the content. And pesky VPNs make it difficult for them to harvest useful visitors info and/or throw tons of partially targeted ads on the poor user’s screen.
Still good info on how to avoid it for the people who do encounter that annoying error page. So thanks for comparing that tidbit of knowledge.
Yup, it’s a VPN. If I turn it off, it works properly even in the same browser (Mullvad). But I refuse to cave in, so if they every start checking for VPNs even in the old Reddit, or disable it altogehter (which I’m sure will be soon, since you can also use it to bypass “Log in to see NSFW content”), I’m out for good, and will finally block Reddit at my Kagi.
I honestly can’t believe they haven’t killed old.reddit yet.
Right?
In-between comments are ads.
Under every post is a recommendation for other subreddits where the last update was 2-3 weeks ago.
Subreddits with clear bait clog up the front page, and no filters to remove them.
Top comments are jokes and memes.
It’s a real shit experience on Reddit right now.
They really leaned hard into the fraud strategy, hoping to IPO in 2023 and run with the money.
It got to the point where the entire front page was just bots reposting the greatest hits, with the comments section literally being bots reposting comments from the first time it was posted. There were entire comment chains of bots just having reposted conversations with each other.
The release of LLM APIs was the last straw, now even the conservatives are jumping ship because it was just a bunch of fascist liars lying to each other. And if there is one thing conservatives hate, it’s being around other conservatives.
Some of those issues went over here pretty quick too.
I feel we have a lot of the faux intellectual crowd who thought 5-10 years ago they were better than other for using reddit.
Nonsense. Most of us thought that at least 10 years ago. Reddit didn’t start going downhill hard until the 2016 US primaries, when /r/conspiracy went from semi-interesting headcannon to full on Trump worship over the span of a week. Then we realized what we were in for but it was like watching a car crash into a dumpster fire.
Watching meme subreddit the_donald go from a fun playground to a serious army of defenders was my wakeup call
IFunny is unironically better
Weren’t these assholes supposed to IPO like 6 months ago? lol
Good. After killing all third party apps the site started to suck more.
Reddit needs to go!
MySpace is still around. Reddit won’t simply “go”. But I do agree and everyone should leave it as they left MySpace in 2008.
Myspace is still around just like Bed Bath and Beyond are still around. The name was bought by another company.
Spez needs to get the old Regina George vs. a bus treatment
